NP Nothing exceeds like excess ...

[Dave Monroe]

Hey, I have this one, Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic:
Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).  Okay for
browsing, but, agreed, a bit on the "lite" side.  Try,
recently ...

Botting, Fred.  Gothic.  New York: Routledge, 1996.  

Bruhm, Stephen.  Gothic Bodies: The Politics of
   Pain in Romantic Fiction.  Philadelphia: U of
   Pennsylvania P, 1995.

Clery, Emma. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction,
   1762-1800.  New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Grunenberg, Christoph, ed.  Gothic: Transmutations
   of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art.
   Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 1997.

Halberstam, Judith.  Skin Shows: Gothic Horror
   and the Technology of Monsters.  Durham, NC:
   Duke UP, 1995.   

Hurley, Kelly.  The Gothic Body: Sexuality,
   Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de
   Siecle.  New York; Cambridge UP, 1997.

Masse, Michelle. In the Name of Love: Women,
   Masochism, and the Gothic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
   UP, 1992.

Williams, Anne.  Art of Darkness: A Poetics
   of Gothic.  Chicago; U of Chicago P, 1995.

1995 seems to have been a watershed year in gothic
studies.  But the sublime and the gothic are rather
more intimately related than your reviewer allows
here, as any of the above titles will demonstrate
(Williams' particular take is that the sublime is the
masculization of otherwise typically 'feminine"
sttributes, responses).  Keep in mind that element of
horror, terror, abjection (albeit at a distance)
inherent in Edmund Burke's conception of the sublime
(a Philosophical Enquiry ...) which would later erupt
into rather more immediate Terror in the nigh-unto
"sublime" (it does rather fit Burke's definition, at
least as he writes of it) event of The Frence
Revolution (Reflections on the Revolution in France). 
Here, see ...

Kristeva, Julia.  Powers of Horror: An Essay in
   Abjection.  Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.  New York:
   Columbia UP, 1990.

Paulson, Ronald.  Representations of Revolution,
   1789-1820.  New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1983. 

And some recent works on the sublime ...

De Bolla, Peter.  The Discourse of the Sublime.
   Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Ferguson, Frances.  Solitude and the Sublime:
   Romanticism and the Aesthetics of
   Individuation. New York: Routledge, 1992

Hertz, Neil.  The End of the Line: Essays on
   Psychoanalysis and teh Sublime. New York:
   Columbia UP, 1985. 

Lyotard, Jean-Francois.  The Inhuman: Reflections
  on Time.  Trans. Geoff Bennington.  Stanford, CA:
  Stanford UP, 1991.

Miller Frank, Felicia.  The Mechanical Song:
   Women, Voice and the Artificial in Nineteenth
   Century French Narrative.  Stanford, CA:
   Stanford UP, 1995.

Tsang, Lap-Chuen.  The Sublime: Groundwork
   Towards a Theory.  Rochester, NY: Boydell and
   Brewer, 1998.

Hertz, as I recall, has an essay in particular on the
French Revolution as well.  At any rate, if i'm not
currently getting any use out of any of this stuff, at
least I can get some mention ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> A recent book about aspects of "the Gothick
> imagination" reviewed, with a 
> number of references to recent list topics, at
> 
> 
> 
> review excerpt:
> 
> "If any one thing characterises all phases or
> instances of gothic taste it
> is reliance on the irrational, although this lies
> too at the heart of ideas
> about the nature of the sublime, also much in vogue
> in English culture at
> the time of the formation of gothic taste."
> 
> best


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